Racial Stereotypes Toward Chinese and Foreign Policy Preference Toward China

• In Event: International Responses to China’s Global Presence

Abstract

Do Americans’ racial stereotypes toward Chinese affect their foreign policy preference toward China? Further, do foreign policy preferences toward China affect their attitudes and behavior toward ethnic Chinese? With the deterioration of US-China relations and the rising violence against Chinese around the world, these are realistically urgent and important questions. This research is motivated by these aggravating concerns, and hence bears strong realistic significance. Although research on stereotyping, especially racial stereotyping, is abundant in social psychology, most of the political science literature on racial stereotyping is on candidate race, voters’ racial stereotypes, and voting; very few studies the linkages between racial stereotypes and foreign policy preference. This research studies racial attitudes and foreign policy preference as both causes and effects and seeks to detect and detangle the causal relationship between the two, if any, through two survey experiments in the US. It studies the effects of public attitudes toward a group on public attitudes (and hence preferred action) toward a state that the group is linked to, and vice versa. In the first experiment, we randomly prime respondents to common stereotypes of Chinese (both positive and negative) and then ask their foreign policy preference toward China. In the second experiment, we randomly expose respondents with information of a hawkish or dovish U.S. foreign policy towards China and then ask their attitudes toward Chinese Americans. Our preliminary results indeed show that positive stereotypes of Chinese lead to more cooperative attitudes toward China while negative stereotypes increase support for more aggressive American foreign policy. Results from our second experiment illustrate that Americans’ attitudes toward Chinese or Asian Americans in general are heavily influenced by the rhetoric of U.S. foreign policy toward China. Taken together, our experimental results suggest that there is a circular relationship between the two, that is, racial attitudes do affect one’s foreign policy preference, and foreign policy preference further affects one’s racial attitudes, causing a mutually reinforcing pattern. Our study is among the first to examine the linkages between racial stereotypes and Americans’ foreign policy preferences toward Chinese and provides a nuanced understanding of the formation of citizens’ foreign policy preferences.

Authors

• Frances Yaping Wang, Colgate University

• Boliang Zhu, Pennsylvania State University